The Team

Amandine Bouinot

Junior Digital Strategist

The age of images in search has dawned and Pinterest is the latest catch-phrase on everyone’s lips. A photo sharing social network, this virtual pinboard allows people from all over the world to connect via their similar interests. For optimisers it presents a different opportunity: a new SEO strategy.

A platform that is exclusively used to express individual’s interests and help them discover interesting recipes, crafts and topics, Pinterest hosts over 12 million unique visitors on a monthly basis- 80% of which are female between the ages of 25 and 44. All the stats suggest that Pinterest drives retail sales and provides a targeted audience. Convinced yet? Even Barack Obama uses it.

Pinterest’s 5 Best SEO Strategy Tips

Pinterest Boards: Make sure that the titles of your boards are keyword rich and meaningful. Categorise correctly in order to increase your visibility in Pinterest search.

Don’t just ‘pin’ images, optimise them: Seeing as ‘pins’ can rank in search page results, picture captions should be treated as optimisable copy. If you were to ‘pin’ a picture of the Eiffel Tower and include an appropriate key-phrase crafted description, people Googling pictures of the Eiffel Tower would potentially see this:

Image Link Building: Yes, that’s right- all images that you ‘pin’ to your boards can be linked back to your site. Go the traditional image SEO strategy route and use the Google Webmaster Central Blog in order to get your upload/web-sourced picture indexed.

SEO Social Media Marketing Strategy: It’s all about integration. Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook should be used harmoniously together. Share your ‘pins’ on two of the most popular social networks and who knows, they might just go viral.

Use Quality Non-Copyrighted Images: With the rise of Instagram, we’re all budding photographers. Maximise the potential ‘re-pins’ of your image by using quality rather than quantity. Also remember to only ‘pin’ images that you have a license to use.

In order to get behind search engines’ use of social media interactions as an assessment of search authority within their algorithms, optimisers are advised to adopt an SEO image linking strategy. So if you’re in it to win it- pin it. Use Pinterest.